Worth your Time

Every so often, you run across something quite beautiful. I was lucky enough to meet Karl James as @2plus2makes5 on twitter and take the time to look at his site. Karl is director of something called the Dialogue Project – a pretty amazing organisation. I won’t attempt to describe it. Better you go to the site and read for yourself. However, what I’d like to point your attention to is a number of recorded interviews he has made available from his blog, Understanding Difference.

It might seem obvious that talking and listening would be beneficial to the human race – that we might know each other better, find more in common, feel each others’ humanity more deeply – if we did more of it. However, listening to a number of these recordings, I was struck by how often standard ‘interviews’ don’t really produce the satisfying sense of knowing we hoped they would. You might think that recordings of non-celebrities, people just like you or me, talking about themselves might be boring, but it’s quite the opposite. The interviews are very deftly guided. The subjects are given a lot of space – there are some very long silences in which the subject is allowed to construct their narratives eloquently. This is markedly different from the usual type of interview that is done for broadcast where there is an overarching fear of dead air – silence.

What I’d like to invite you to explore are the series that have been recorded on sex.  Well, the subject is ostensibly sex, but in fact, the narratives become inextricably joined to understanding of self, of how one is seen by the world, how memory plays an enormous part in constructing our understanding of who we are and where we are.

The Dear Listeners post summarizes each of the interviews and links to MP3 files. They are all amazing, haunting, startling and in parts disturbing. Each, in their own way, told me not only about the person being interviewed, but also something about myself. More interesting, I thought, was that in listening to some of the narratives, I got a glimpse of a way of seeing that was utterly alien to me. It made me wonder what it must be like to go through the world seeing things in that very different way.

My favourite interview by far is Adrian’s. Prepared to Love is achingly emotional. I grinned, I laughed, I cringed, I cried through Adrian’s telling of how, at the age of 42, he decided it was time to experience penetrative sex, and hired an escort to achieve his goal. Of course, it turns out the ‘goal’ didn’t matter nearly as much as the journey. Also what I appreciated most – although to some extent this is true for all the interviews – is that it would be so easy to make Adrian a caricature. In fact, at times, you can almost hear him trying to resort to that himself.

What the project teaches us is that it’s so much easier and lazier to generalize, to superficialize, to turn people into cliches. But underneath, no one is a cliche or a caricature. You just have to do the work and dig deep enough, listen hard enough, allow yourself to let their stories seep under your skin to overcome the habit of chunking information, classifying, labeling. No one is simple. No one is uncomplicated.

As a writer, I found all the interviews powerfully inspirational. It was as if, after each recording, I thought…wow, I could so write this person. There is a kind of magic to the way Karl and, in one of the interviews, Julie, his partner, get their subjects to be so intensely self-reflective. I’m not sure if it’s the interview technique or that the subjects they’ve chosen were particularly self-analytical.

I’d be interested to hear your reaction to the interviews. Which one spoke to you the most and why?